The most important things cannot be measured. The issues that are most important, long term, cannot be measured in advance.

—W. Edwards Deming

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

—Agile Manifesto

Metrics

Metrics are agreed-upon measures used to evaluate how well the organization is progressing toward the portfolio, large solution, program, and team’s business and technical objectives.

Thanks to its work physics, timeboxes, and fast feedback, Agile is inherently more measurable than its proxy-based predecessor, the waterfall process. Moreover, with Agile, the “system always runs.” So, the best measure comes directly from the objective evaluation of the working system. Continuous delivery and DevOps practices provide even more things to measure. All other measures—even the extensive set of Lean-Agile metrics outlined below—are secondary to the overriding goal of focusing on rapid delivery of high-quality solutions.

But metrics are indeed important in the enterprise context. SAFe provides metrics for each level of the Framework. The links below navigate to the entries on this page.

Large Solution

Team

Portfolio Metrics

Lean Portfolio Metrics

The set of Lean portfolio metrics provided here is an example of a comprehensive but Lean group of measures that can be used to assess internal and external progress for an entire portfolio. In the spirit of “the simplest set of measures that can work,” Figure 1 provides the leanest that a few Lean-Agile portfolios are using effectively to evaluate the overall performance of their transformations.

Portfolio Kanban Board

The primary purpose of the Portfolio Kanban board is to ensure that Epics are weighed and analyzed before reaching a Program Increment (PI) boundary. This way, they can be prioritized appropriately and have established acceptance criteria to guide a high-fidelity implementation. Further, the business and enabler epics can then be tracked to understand their progress.

Epic Progress Measure

This report provides an at-a-glance view of the status of all epics in a portfolio.

Epic X – Represents the name of the epic; business epics are blue, and enabler epics are red

Bar length – Represents the total current estimated story points for an epic’s child features/stories; the dark green shaded area represents the actual story points completed; the light shaded area depicts the total story points that are in progress

Vertical red line – Represents the initial epic estimate, in story points, from the Lean business case

0000 / 0000 – The first number represents the current story point estimate (summarized from its child features/stories); the second number represents the initial story point estimate (also represented by the vertical red line)

Enterprise Balanced Scorecard

The enterprise balanced scorecard provides four perspectives to measure performance for each portfolio—although the popularity of this approach has been declining over time in favor of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), as shown in Figure 1. These measures are:

Efficiency

Value delivery

Quality

Agility

These results are then mapped into an executive dashboard, as illustrated in Figures 4 and 5.

Figure 4. A balanced scorecard approach, dividing measures into four areas of interest

Figure 5. Converting the above metrics to an alphabetical rating and summarizing the data to the enterprise provides a broader picture of performance

For more on this approach, see chapter 22 of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises [2].

Lean Portfolio Management Self-Assessment

The Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) continuously assesses and improves their methods. The LPM periodically conducts a self-assessment questionnaire to measure their performance, which automatically produces a radar chart like the one shown in Figure 6. It highlights the relative strengths and weaknesses.

Large Solution Metrics

Solution Kanban Board

The primary purpose of the Solution Kanban board is to ensure that Capabilities are reviewed and analyzed before reaching a PI boundary. This way, they can be prioritized appropriately, using established acceptance criteria to guide a high-fidelity implementation. Further, the features can then be tracked to understand their progress.

Program Kanban Board

The primary purpose of the Program Kanban board is to ensure that features are reviewed and analyzed before reaching a PI boundary. This way they can be prioritized appropriately, with established acceptance criteria to guide a high-fidelity implementation. Further, the features can be tracked to understand the performance of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

Agile Release Train Self-Assessment

As program execution is a core value of SAFe, the ART continuously strives to improve its performance. The RTE fills out the self-assessment questionnaire at PI boundaries or any time the train wants to pause and reflect on their progress. Trending this data over time is a key performance indicator. Figure 14 gives an example of the results in a radar chart.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline Efficiency

The pipeline efficiency compares the amount of touch time versus wait time. Some of the information can be sourced automatically from tools, especially Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, while other data requires manually recording in a spreadsheet. The value stream mapping technique is often applied to analyze problems identified in this report

Note: The touch time represents when the team is adding value. Typically, touch time is only a small proportion of the total production time, most of the time is spent waiting, such as moving work, waiting in queues and so on.

Recovery over Time

This report measures the number of rollbacks that occurred either physically or by turning off feature toggles. The date when a solution was deployed or released to production is also plotted here to determine if there is a relationship between the two.

Innovation Accounting and Leading Indicators

One of the goals of the continuous delivery pipeline is to enable the organization to run experiments quickly to allow Customers to validate the hypotheses. As a result, both Minimal Marketable Features (MMFs) and Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) must define the leading indicators to measure progress toward the benefit hypothesis. Avoid relying on vanity metrics that do not measure real progress.

Figure 19 shows some metrics that were gathered from the SAFe website to demonstrate leading indicators for our development efforts.

Hypotheses Tested over Time

The primary goal of hypothesis-driven development is to create small experiments that are validated as soon as possible by customers or their proxies. Figure 20 shows the number of verified hypotheses vs. failures in a PI.

Figure 20. Hypotheses tested over time

In an environment of quick testing (see [3] for more information), a high failure rate may indicate that the team is rapidly learning to progress toward a good outcome.

Team Kanban Board

A Team Kanban process evolution is iterative. The team’s bottlenecks should surface after defining the initial process steps (e.g., define, analyze, review, build, integrate, test) and Work in Process (WIP) limits, and after executing for a while. If not, the team refines the states or further reduces the WIP until it’s obvious which step is ‘starving’ or is too full, helping the team adjust for a better flow.

SAFe Team Self-Assessment

Agile teams continuously assess and improve their process. One such tool is a simple SAFe team practices assessment. When the team completes the spreadsheet, it will automatically produce a radar chart like the one shown in Figure 23, which highlights relative strengths and weaknesses.